PI Energy on Electric Vehicles
A promising and unique market for PI Energy’s technology is the electric vehicle (EV) market. We want to address a frequent question: How far could one drive a car wrapped with PI Energy’s PV technology?
While our technology is still in development and the final performance numbers will require a real-life test, we expect that PI Energy will provide a compelling market solution. Although there are no current commercial EVs in the market with substantial solar PV, there have been some notable feasibility tests. In 2019, Toyota announced its participation in road trials of electric vehicles equipped with high efficiency triple junction solar PV modules that covered a limited area of the car, the roof, hood and back window. This extended the driving range and allowed the vehicle to charge while parked or while driving during the day. The triple junction solar modules used in the demo test vehicle are extremely expensive, so commercially they are used to power space satellites, where their relative cost is small. Toyota’s stated results of the demo vehicle were 27.7 miles (44.5 km) per day range extension, which is just over the average daily driving in the US in 2017. This suggests that a cost-effective PI Energy solution, that can cover more surface area, will be of commercially valuable.
A big challenge to integrate solar modules on electric vehicles is that most car exteriors are curved surfaces. In the Toyota test, the solar modules were made up of many smaller articulated modules, so the area actually covered with solar modules in the demo was decreased due to spacing of traditional modules across the vehicle’s curved surfaces. Notably, the Toyota demo vehicle only had solar modules installed on some top surfaces, leaving a large portion of surfaces free from modules.
PI Energy’s solar film, with a low installed-cost, can be wrapped on a passenger vehicle, enabling harvesting of sunlight across a larger area, including most of the car surface, without covering the windows (which are helpful to see the road). PI Energy’s technology design allows for capturing off-angle sunlight, extending solar energy collection to the morning and afternoon. We project that PI Energy’s commercial solar PV materials could provide about 20 miles per day average, in Southern California for a typical electric vehicle, at a market competitive price. The graph below shows the relative sunlight capture on a traditional solar module demo (left) and PI Energy’s technology (right), where all of the blue surface would be covered by PI Energy’s solar PV material.
Traditional solar module installation versus PI Energy’s EV concept.
The benefit of PI Energy’s technology for passenger EVs is:
Competitive cost for installed solar wrap modules.
Good performance at high temperatures – this is important as car surfaces warm up in sunlight.
Extending the electric vehicle range by about a typical daily commute.
Good off-angle sunlight performance.
Substantially reducing charging infrastructure requirements.
On-board passive daylight charging, with less plug-in fast charging, which extends battery life and performance.
More On Battery Benefits
Applying PI Energy’s PV on a large portion of the vehicle’s surface could provide a meaningful recharge to the battery. The resulting benefits to the battery would include:
Reducing need for fast charging.
Reducing deep discharge and prolonged low state of charge conditions.
Practically eliminating battery drain due to thermal management when the vehicle is parked at a hot sunny location.
These three benefits prolong battery life and performance, while extending the vehicle range and improving battery safety, which in turn can lower the cost of electric vehicles and lower operating costs - accelerating the growth of the global EV market.
Batteries on EVs
Charging Bottleneck
A lack of EV charging stations is a bottleneck for EV growth. PI Energy’s technology has the potential to reduce the huge costs of needed charging stations and infrastructure that are required to meet electric vehicle growth targets.
Most developed countries are targeting policies to increase EV sales. The current policy target of the US is for zero-emission vehicles to make up 50% of all new vehicles sold in 2030. The European Union has an aggressive policy goal that effectively bans new fossil-fuel cars by 2035. This is good news for EV enthusiasts, but with current market technologies, this will require a vast increase in charging stations and large-scale upgrades to the US electrical grid.
Today, the majority of EV owners in the US have some charging at home, but to expand the market, we will need to address the needs of EV owners who don’t have this option. In the US there are about 50,000 publicly-accessible charging stations, with most being installed with state and federal subsidies over the past decade. Future EV charging costs are projected to increase substantially. The best estimates we have seen predict a need for more than 1.2 million new charging stations to meet EV growth targets in the US.
We will need to meet the double challenge of increasing commercial charging costs and also the need for millions of new charging stations. PI Energy plans to capitalize on this opportunity by enabling solar PV on zero-emission vehicles, reducing the need for grid-connected charging with free solar energy, potentially saving US consumers and taxpayers billions of dollars of charging and infrastructure costs.
We want to make EV more practical and save customers money by using our technology.